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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

No. Any city needs a good way to get around. Ideally any person could go from any point to any point with ease. Theres nothing fundamentally special about the mechanism used to do so. If cars can do it, great! If they can't but trains and trolleys can, good!

I maintain that a pre-requisite to "good" public transportation is bad infrastructure for cars. If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed.

Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.

Self-driving cars are obviously the future. Well, part of the future at least. I'm very curious what the "ideal" city would look like with self-driving cars at the center. What would a city look like if built from the ground up with them in mind?

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I'm sorry, but this is just a load of bollocks. There is a fundamental difference between public transport and cars, other than the upfront investment that was pointed out in another comment: A car is a ~12m2 sized thing that you have to (a) somehow route into the system (road space requirements) and (b) leave somewhere when you do your business.

(a) is an overhead of a factor of ~40 compared to people standing and a factor or ~20 compared to people sitting for the transport alone (I'm assuming here people driving alone, which from experience is how this mostly works out).

(b) is an additional constant overhead of 12m2 for every participant that's not moving.

In computer science terms, your network protocol sucks, and leads to inefficient cities.

Would you like an example? L.A. metro area has about the same size as Greater Tokyo, produces about the same amount of carbon emissions total (!) [5], yet provides space for 2.5x less people and produces ~2.4x less GDP at purchase power parity [1],[2],[3],[4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_metropolitan_area

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP

[5] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223399559_Twelve_met...

Self-driving cars don't have to be left somewhere. They can go and transport other people. Or they can drive themselves out of the way somewhere to hang out for awhile. Or some combination there of.

I'm not sure how much I want to comment on your math equation. It's obviously much more complicated. It can't be reduced to an equation.

ideal self-driving cars basically remove (b) from my equation. The thing is, even if self-driving cars are around the corner now, I reckon that the type you can just leave on its own without any humans inside are still far out. Even just a solution for driving in bad weather conditions hasn't been tackled at all yet - you can't just shut down the city transport just because snow has covered up most of the visual markers. So, self-driving cars isn't going to solve any network problems for quite a while, and even when they do you still have overhead (a), which intuitively I'd say is even more important. I don't think it's that complicated btw. - if you do, please provide things I haven't considered and significantly change the outcome of the calculation.

Nope. Having a good car infrastructure doesn't mean everyone has or can have a car.

No amount of car infrastructure will serve the need of having the city core fill up with workers driving in their own cars during the day, either.

In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again.

"In a fictional future world where self-driving cars are ubiquitous, they'll likely serve, in miniature form, the same role that buses and trams do now; except they'll be more point-to-point than those; one could pick you and a few others on the corner near your flat, drive you to your offices, and go do it again."

To be honest, since I suspect that world won't be fictional, I think this whole debate is really a waste of time now. It wouldn't even matter if an alien brain ray struck the entire world and suddenly everybody agreed that public transportation was totally the only way to do anything ever, and all public transport spending was 100% rerouted into public transport... self-driving cars would still obviate all the plans before we could possibly fully enact them.

In a world where that level of consensus isn't going to happen, it's even moreso a waste of time.

I think that is an implausible level of optimism about the ubiquity of self-driving cars.

Building for a mixed-used future, with public transit serving a lot of people's needs for the next 30-40 years, and self-driving cars potentially starting to fill in the gaps in our lifetimes, seems like a far more realistic solution than "do nothing and wait for self-driving cars".

It's realism about the fact that you aren't going to drop in public transport everywhere in the US in anything less than several decades anyhow, in the face of the realistic opposition you're going to encounter to such a plan. It's fundamentally a hard sell you're trying to make for a lot of people, to give up the freedom to go anywhere they want whenever they want in exchange for going where the public transportation is going when the public transportation is going there. In a dense city like NY that may not be much of a tradeoff, but in huge swathes of the US that's an attempt to sell an incredible shrinkage of personal power to feed the moral goals that are, statistically speaking, not even necessarily particularly shared by the people being asked to give up their cars.

Quite a lot of people don't live in the big cities, after all.

On the other hand, when you can either own a car for all the money the public transport people are generally complaining about, or you can use a self-driving car service that still takes you anywhere you want, anytime you want, for less than you could own a car for, you've got a much easier sell.

If self-driving cars don't happen, well, frankly, give up your public transportation dreams. Self-driving car transport networks the only realistic path forward. Perhaps there are alternate universes where everything worked out peachy, but that doesn't provide you any help moving forward here.

What?

Nearly every city already has public transportation, mostly buses, though more light rail/streetcar lines are built year by year. I know that very, very small towns (e.g. of the size you can walk across in 20 minutes) often have no bus system, but of course one isn't needed when the town is small enough.

No one's restricting your freedom by building public transportation, either. I have no idea where you're getting any of this stuff.

I know of no US city that's looking at an auto ban in the city core, not like some European cities have done. If you do, I'd love to hear more.

I can't even make sense of the the last paragraph you wrote, "if self-driving cars don't happen, give up your public transportation dreams"? Public transportation already exists, and self-driving cars are decades off from being available to the general public.

"Nearly every city already has public transportation, mostly buses,"

Oh, well, then, problem solved.

Why are we even having this conversation, then?

Obviously, because you want more than we currently have, in a rather staggering quantity. You can't both have enough and want much, much more whenever it suits you in the argument.

Original post said "If you had good car infrastructure, and many medium sized cities do, the public transportion wouldn't be needed." That is not true. Public transportation will always play a role.

You were the one who brought up freedom??

> Good transportation for large, dense cities is an unsolved problem. In the US New York and its fabled subways result in the #1 longest commutes in the country. No thank you.

New Yorkers have long commutes because of how phenomenally efficient their public transportation system is. During rush hour, it takes up to two hours to drive the 15-17 miles from my parents house in the Virginia suburbs to the middle of DC. An hour and a half is typical, most of it parked on I-66 or GW Parkway. The Metro North from Greenwich to Manhattan makes that 30-mile trip in an hour flat, like clockwork, in a far denser metro area.

Try visiting Hong Kong sometime. Great road infrastructure. Great (possibly best in the world) subways. Roads are full of buses, delivery trucks, and taxis. Individuals don't own cars unless they're enormously rich, because it's 4-8x as expensive to own a car as in countries like the US.

Cities with good public transportation have longer commutes because a long commute on public transportation is far more tolerable than a long commute by car.

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